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The thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in aw

The thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in awesome ML powered systems, it's still 99% bland foundation, 1% cool algorithms. Hell, as a manager, you don't want only "rockstar" developers because they'll become bored working on the plumbing code, which again, is most work. From datascience there's the phrase "Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work" and it sounds like he wants only those people? Why?

rich_sasha 4y ago
It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  All personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart. But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic. FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.
  - wittycardio 4y ago
    He might not be an idiot but that doesn't mean he knows how software works either
    - dont__panic 4y ago
      Smart and idiot might not be mutually exclusive. I've known a lot of smart people who can act idiotic in certain circumstances. Elon could be very smart when it comes to engineering... but idiotic when it comes to running Twitter.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    OK, so how do I square that up with a request to document programming prowess with screenshots?
    - fragmede 4y ago
      That he doesn't have any other way to look at any code because he doesn't have a Phabricator account
      - foldr 4y ago
        He's unable to receive ASCII text strings over email?
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      He's not actually trying to document programming prowess with screenshots. They've already fired everyone they want to fire, this is some sort of "welcome to twitter 2.0" ritual
  - user_named 4y ago
    He lied about having a physics degree and he can't code. He knows nothing about engineering.
- vitiral 4y ago
  He used to be able to code. He created zip2 (predecessor to MapQuest) practically by himself apparently.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    Without a source on that "apparently" I'm going to take that as the output of Musk's usual legend-building apparatus. The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.
  - papito 4y ago
    He also pissed people off by insisting PayPal runs on Windows instead of Linux. Hey, I have fond memories of coding for the Windows platform for fun, but especially back in the day we kind of scoffed at those who wanted to run mission-critical systems on a Windows server.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Everyone who actually worked for him say that he understands all the engineering intricacies. Karpathy said that. Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...
  - ahahahahah 4y ago
    Considering that he lashes out at the smallest slight, I'm rather unsurprised that people depending on him for their livelihood sing his praises.
    - alsodumb 4y ago
      Tom Mueller is a highly respected engineer, and just because what he says doesn't align with your narrative or belief doesn't mean he is singing praises. Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.
- gofwrath 4y ago
  If I were at Twitter and received this email, I would be providing code and commits focused on business impact. Saliency is scoped to something, and without explanation that 'something' is likely the business. The context is engineering at twitter, not programming. In other words, not silly one liners that are not immediately obvious but instead business critical code that moved the needle -- however bland.
Barrin92 4y ago
It's literally just some bizarre hazing ritual. Trying to evaluate whether code is good or bad from some screenshots without understanding the context and being familiar with the codebase makes no sense anyway. Anyone can show you ten screenshots of formally well written code and you have no idea whether it's useless or not.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  how many commits of the fast inverse square root are being added to twitter's codebase right now, you think?
- Teandw 4y ago
  Where did he say that he will evaluate if the code is good or bad? He didn't. It's more likely just a way to see what employees think is their most important work.
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.
    - Teandw 4y ago
      He did specify. He asked for most salient. Salient means "most noticeable or important." He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria? Is he going to be happy to see wonderful high level distributed designs? Great coding practices at the micro level? Unit tests? Performance-oriented code? Ops greatness? CRUD boilerplate that any junior IC could jump into without much understanding (seems like this might be a stealth winner if he’s gearing up to build a skeleton crew of low-seniority devs that don’t have a lot of career options). Is feature work sexy to him or does he want to see work that is oriented around KTLO cost minimization? Improvements on usability (decreases support costs)? Reliability? Scalability? Security mindset? (obviously kidding about that last one) There are so many things that are “salient” depending on his priorities and attitudes that this is a fool’s errand.
331c8c71 4y ago
I am lost. Where did Musk say anything about fanciness of the code? Or is it your interpretation of what he said?
- rwhyan 4y ago
  > Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    “Salient” is not a synonym of “fancy”.
    - orwin 4y ago
      In case of code, isn't it basically the same? I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex. The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work. I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.
      - cloverich 4y ago
        Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.
        orwin 4y ago
wellareyousure 4y ago
- com2kid 4y ago
  > We don’t ever, ever want B players on an A team. Define B players. I've hired engineers not because they are the most amazing coders, but because they are amazing at finding out what is wrong organizationally and then making the needed friends to help move things along. I've hired engineers who are catalysts for making other engineers perform better. I've hired engineers who wrote solid code, at a reliable speed, but whom I wouldn't describe as "brilliant". I could assign them a feature and know they'd hit the deliverable date +/- a day, every single time. Sure I had rockstar 10x engineers, but it takes all types, and focusing on "amount of quality code churned out per hour" is only going to work in certain organizations at certain times in a company's life.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Jeff Dean would be dismissed. Sanjay types in the code.
tennisflyi 4y ago
> most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. So a decent amount of devs get a nice six-figure salary (RSU, equity), pretty good benefits, kush perks, and more to mess with a template? Órale...

rich_sasha 4y ago

It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?

bcrosby95 4y ago
All personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart. But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic. FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  He might not be an idiot but that doesn't mean he knows how software works either
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Smart and idiot might not be mutually exclusive. I've known a lot of smart people who can act idiotic in certain circumstances. Elon could be very smart when it comes to engineering... but idiotic when it comes to running Twitter.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  OK, so how do I square that up with a request to document programming prowess with screenshots?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    That he doesn't have any other way to look at any code because he doesn't have a Phabricator account
    - foldr 4y ago
      He's unable to receive ASCII text strings over email?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    He's not actually trying to document programming prowess with screenshots. They've already fired everyone they want to fire, this is some sort of "welcome to twitter 2.0" ritual
- user_named 4y ago
  He lied about having a physics degree and he can't code. He knows nothing about engineering.
vitiral 4y ago
He used to be able to code. He created zip2 (predecessor to MapQuest) practically by himself apparently.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Without a source on that "apparently" I'm going to take that as the output of Musk's usual legend-building apparatus. The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.
- papito 4y ago
  He also pissed people off by insisting PayPal runs on Windows instead of Linux. Hey, I have fond memories of coding for the Windows platform for fun, but especially back in the day we kind of scoffed at those who wanted to run mission-critical systems on a Windows server.
alsodumb 4y ago
Everyone who actually worked for him say that he understands all the engineering intricacies. Karpathy said that. Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...
- ahahahahah 4y ago
  Considering that he lashes out at the smallest slight, I'm rather unsurprised that people depending on him for their livelihood sing his praises.
  - alsodumb 4y ago
    Tom Mueller is a highly respected engineer, and just because what he says doesn't align with your narrative or belief doesn't mean he is singing praises. Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.
gofwrath 4y ago
If I were at Twitter and received this email, I would be providing code and commits focused on business impact. Saliency is scoped to something, and without explanation that 'something' is likely the business. The context is engineering at twitter, not programming. In other words, not silly one liners that are not immediately obvious but instead business critical code that moved the needle -- however bland.

Barrin92 4y ago

It's literally just some bizarre hazing ritual. Trying to evaluate whether code is good or bad from some screenshots without understanding the context and being familiar with the codebase makes no sense anyway. Anyone can show you ten screenshots of formally well written code and you have no idea whether it's useless or not.

MarkMarine 4y ago
how many commits of the fast inverse square root are being added to twitter's codebase right now, you think?
Teandw 4y ago
Where did he say that he will evaluate if the code is good or bad? He didn't. It's more likely just a way to see what employees think is their most important work.
- hamburglar 4y ago
  If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.
  - Teandw 4y ago
    He did specify. He asked for most salient. Salient means "most noticeable or important." He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria? Is he going to be happy to see wonderful high level distributed designs? Great coding practices at the micro level? Unit tests? Performance-oriented code? Ops greatness? CRUD boilerplate that any junior IC could jump into without much understanding (seems like this might be a stealth winner if he’s gearing up to build a skeleton crew of low-seniority devs that don’t have a lot of career options). Is feature work sexy to him or does he want to see work that is oriented around KTLO cost minimization? Improvements on usability (decreases support costs)? Reliability? Scalability? Security mindset? (obviously kidding about that last one) There are so many things that are “salient” depending on his priorities and attitudes that this is a fool’s errand.

331c8c71 4y ago

I am lost. Where did Musk say anything about fanciness of the code? Or is it your interpretation of what he said?

rwhyan 4y ago
> Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
- hnarn 4y ago
  “Salient” is not a synonym of “fancy”.
  - orwin 4y ago
    In case of code, isn't it basically the same? I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex. The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work. I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.
    - cloverich 4y ago
      Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.
      - orwin 4y ago

wellareyousure 4y ago

com2kid 4y ago
> We don’t ever, ever want B players on an A team. Define B players. I've hired engineers not because they are the most amazing coders, but because they are amazing at finding out what is wrong organizationally and then making the needed friends to help move things along. I've hired engineers who are catalysts for making other engineers perform better. I've hired engineers who wrote solid code, at a reliable speed, but whom I wouldn't describe as "brilliant". I could assign them a feature and know they'd hit the deliverable date +/- a day, every single time. Sure I had rockstar 10x engineers, but it takes all types, and focusing on "amount of quality code churned out per hour" is only going to work in certain organizations at certain times in a company's life.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Jeff Dean would be dismissed. Sanjay types in the code.

tennisflyi 4y ago

> most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. So a decent amount of devs get a nice six-figure salary (RSU, equity), pretty good benefits, kush perks, and more to mess with a template? Órale...